Open Forum with Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker

We are honored to welcome Professor Pasuk Phongpaichit and Dr. Chris Baker, awardees of the Fukuoka Grand Prize, 2017 and long-time friends of CSEAS. We hope to take this chance to celebrate the award and hear about their lifelong work, which covers unparalleled width and versatility: from political economy of Thailand since the 1980s to the present, history of Ayutthaya, to Thai classical literature. Always so willing to engage in discussion with us in Kyoto, this time Ajarn Pasuk and Chris have agreed to talk about their work with some personal touches in response to our request to hear about the wonder of how they have worked together.

Excerpt from the Fukuoka Grand Prize:

Prof. Pasuk Phongpaichit and Dr. Chris Baker are the worthy recipients of the Grand Prize of the Fukuoka Prize, because of their multidisciplinary and comprehensive analysis of the social changes which Thailand has experienced since the period of rapid economic growth in the 1980s, an analysis based on a combination of Western and Eastern intellectual approaches, and of methodologies from the social sciences and the humanities, which has added breadth and depth to academic research, in both subject-matter and methodology, in a fresh and distinctively Asian way; and also because of their active contributions to society.